Global average temperatures, and “global warming”, often give the impression of a gradual change in Earth’s climate occurring uniformly across the planet. This is far from the truth – particularly at the ends of the Earth. The Arctic and Antarctic are behaving very differently from the global picture.

But in the past few months its seasonal progression has stalled, plunging Earth’s sea ice cover off the charts to the lowest levels on record for November. Explaining what has caused this unexpectedly dramatic downturn in sea ice is a tale of two poles.

Global sea ice area (including Antarctica and the Arctic) by year, 1977-2016. National Snow and Ice Data Centre.Wipneus/NSIDC

Arctic amplifiers

The northern polar region is an epicentre for change in our warming world.

As the climate warms, it’s no surprise that ice melts. What is less obvious is that when bright, white ice melts it is replaced with a dark surface (the ocean or land). Just as a black car parked in the sun will warm up faster than a white one, so the dark surface absorbs more heat from the sun than ice. This extra heat promotes more ice loss, and so the cycle goes.

This can explain the marked long-term decline of Arctic sea ice. But it can’t explain why the past month has seen such a sudden and dramatic change. For this we need to look to the weather.

A weaving jet stream allows warm air to penetrate further northwards over the Arctic (the flip side is that extremely cold polar air can also be pulled south over the northern hemisphere continents, causing extreme cold snaps). This appears to be responsible for the current extremely warm temperatures over the Arctic Ocean, which have caused the normal advance of winter sea ice to stall.

The westerly winds that circle the Southern Ocean (analogous to the northern hemisphere’s jet stream) have strengthened and moved closer to Antarctica over the past few decades. One of the effects of this has been to push sea ice away from the Antarctic continent, making for a more expansive coverage across the surrounding ocean.

But the westerly winds are fickle. They are able to change their path across the Southern Ocean very quickly. And so while the southward march in their average position over many years is clear, predicting their behaviour from month to month remains difficult. This spring the westerly winds have tended to sit closer to Australia and out of reach of Antarctica’s sea ice.

Lessons in the madness

But these pointers to where we are going also need to be assessed in terms of where we have come from. For sea ice, logbooks from the age of heroic exploration suggest that the Antarctic system is mostly still operating within its normal bounds.